SEO

5 Types Of Social Media Networks And The Benefits Of Each One

Published

2 years ago

September 6, 2022

5 Types Of Social Media Networks And The Benefits Of Each One

People use social media to share pictures and videos, post updates, and connect with family, friends, and brands.

Likewise, brands use these social media networks to grow their audiences, conduct target market research, and increase platform engagement.

However, as social media evolves, it can be difficult for brands to determine where to focus their attention. And who has the time to engage on all social media platforms and apps effectively? No one.

So then, which ones should your brand use to connect with its audience? Well, that depends on a couple of factors.

Most brands don’t have the resources or, to be honest, the need to be on all social media platforms, sites, and apps.

In this guide, I’ll discuss the evolution of social media and the top social media networks. I’ll also get into the different brand benefits of each network type.

This will help you strategize where to put your focus, what you want to keep in-house, and areas you might want to outsource.

Evolution Of Social Media

Social media platforms have become an integral part of today’s marketing atmosphere.

They play a significant role in businesses connecting and engaging with current and potential customers.

From sharing information to building relationships, these platforms provide endless opportunities.

When you think of social media, you probably think of the top ones, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter – and you likely lump them together.

But even among these major social media platforms, there are subtypes.

Learning each platform’s different features and potential opportunities can help brands create a more effective social media marketing strategy.

So let’s begin with the old-school platforms. LinkedIn and Facebook (originally Facemash, but who remembers that) launched in 2003.

Twitter followed shortly after that in 2006.

The second wave brought Instagram and Pinterest in 2010. Pinterest’s growth started slow before gaining more traction – today, the platform has over 86 million followers in the U.S. alone

Then, what some consider the first iteration of TikTok – Vine – launched in 2013.

Vine’s surge in popularity was short-lived, as the platform shut down in 2017. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t learn about where people’s attention lies: short-form videos.

Social Media Today

As we see today, social media networks have been competing to keep up with each other and adding more features to keep people on their platforms.

For example, we saw this when Instagram added Instagram Reels to keep up with TikTok.

We also see more platforms, like Twitter, now offering opportunities for its users to go Live.

Now that I’ve covered how platforms compete to evolve and captivate their user’s attention, let’s get into what I mean by a social network.

What Is A Social Network?

A social network is a category or group of a specific type of social media platform or app. There are many types and sub-types of social networks – more than you might think.

I’m sure you’re familiar with specific platforms we’ve already discussed, such as Facebook and Instagram. But what category do these types fall under? And how can your brand best connect with its audience on each?

Next, I’ll break down the following types of social networks and the benefits of each:

Traditional Social Networks.
Media Sharing Networks.
Discussion Networks.
Social Blogging Networks.
Review Networks.

1. Traditional Social Networks

Examples: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.

We talked a lot about traditional social networks, so I won’t go too much more into that type.

But, as I talked about, there are some shifting trends in how brands use traditional social networks.

For example, we can see on LinkedIn and Facebook that people often share articles and long-form posts.

This isn’t to say that short-form posts have gone away; we see short-form posts across all traditional social networks.

We can also see that Facebook has evolved to include more engagement options, such as Facebook Marketplace for shopping, Facebook Live, and Facebook Groups.

The platform also serves as a directory for businesses to create a storefront in the form of a Facebook Page to promote their products, book services, message customers, and leave a space for reviews.

Facebook Pages and Groups are great for brands to engage with their audience and reach new people.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, has been a significant player in online professional networking.

These traditional social networks offer opportunities for brands to use ads to target their audience and conduct market research through Insights and analytics tools.

2. Media Sharing Networks

Examples: Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok.

There are many forms of visual content across media sharing networks, such as infographics, images, and short-form and long-form videos.

While this network type includes video and picture media sharing, most are now multimedia, utilizing audio, video, and pictures.

On Instagram, there are several main ways brands use the platform: video and image sharing on the brand’s profile, then Instagram Stories, IGTV, and Reels.

People use these sites for entertainment, finding information, and sometimes even shopping. This creates ample opportunities for your brand to reach its audience.

Many products have recently gone viral through TikTok. When people can easily purchase through an app, it gives them a direct way to buy before second-guessing.

Brands also use these sites to disseminate how-tos for their products, collaborate with influencers, promote discounts, and more.

When it comes to Pinterest, you can use numerous marketing strategies to grow your brand on the platform.

Visual content is an engaging way to connect with customers and intrigue them to follow and learn more about your brand – and, eventually, buy your products.

Like with traditional social networks, ads perform well on these platforms, especially when brands use insights and analytics to back their strategies.

3. Discussion Networks

Examples: Discord, Reddit, Quora.

When people have specific questions or want to discuss a topic, sometimes platforms like Facebook or Instagram aren’t the place to go.

There can be many reasons why people view and create content across platforms.

But when it comes to sites like Discord or Reddit, users are typically there for answers and to connect with communities of people with similar interests.

People also tend to go to these platforms for research.

Discussion Networks allow brands to answer questions and connect with their communities.

Discord alone offers opportunities to create customer community groups, events, and live streams.

Sometimes, hopping into a discussion about your brand or industry can help clarify topics and show you’re willing to engage with your audience.

Your effort to meet your audience where they like to communicate can go a long way in creating long-term customers.

4. Social Blogging Networks

Examples: Medium, Tumblr, Blog Meets Brand.

When a picture or video isn’t the correct form of content for a particular topic, blogs can be an excellent way to share information with your audience.

Sometimes information is better shared through a blog. For example, it may better explain a subject and help readers understand more complex topics.

Blogs are beneficial for content from thought-leaders. They can expand upon important information or news.

Your brand can also repurpose, expand upon, or share what it creates on its site through social blogging networks.

For newer brands, it’s a great way to develop your voice and build your audience.

These are additional platforms, besides their websites, for brands to share their insights on what matters to them and their target audience.

5. Review Networks

Examples: Yelp, Glassdoor, Google Business Profile, Trip Advisor.

The most important thing for brands regarding review networks is online reputation management.

Quickly responding to both positive and negative reviews – in a polite and empathetic way – is crucial for retaining a positive online reputation.

Reading online reviews has become essential to the customer journey, and your brand should not ignore them.

Claiming listings across various review networks and creating a plan to manage them can help improve your brand’s image. It can also show potential and current customers how your brand responds to critiques.

It can also provide insight into areas of improvement. As a result, it’s an excellent and sometimes underutilized resource.

Check out these Yelp strategies for inspiration on how to optimize your listing.

Reviews are also a critical part of local SEO since when people search locally, they tend to assess the reviews for the businesses in their area before making a purchase.

People often use a mix of Google and Google Maps to find businesses around them. Optimizing your Google Business Profile for local search is essential for reaching more potential customers.

Final Thoughts

Social media has become an overwhelming but incredibly valuable marketing component for brands.

But categorizing the types of social media networks and identifying which ones your brand wants to engage with can help simplify things.

Then, your brand can allocate the right resources, people, and time to create a social media strategy.

Some brands may outsource components of social media management, such as online reputation management, blog writing, social media post creation, ad creation, and customer service across platforms.

After reviewing your brand’s goals, it will be easier to assess which platforms you’ll put effort towards and which are worth skipping, at least for the time being.

More resources:

Featured Image: Khosro/Shutterstock

Related Topics:Benefits Media Networks seo Social Types

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SEO

Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey

Published

13 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Max

Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey

Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.

So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.

You’ll learn:

Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.

With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.

Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

SEO

How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords

Published

16 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.

Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.

There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.

How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
Enter your competitor’s domain
Go to the Organic keywords report

The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”

Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:

Filtering out branded keywords in Organic keywords report

If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.

Finding popular, low-difficulty keywords in Organic keywords

How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t

Go to Competitive Analysis
Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section

Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.

You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.

How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t

Go to Competitive Analysis
Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section

Competitive analysis report with multiple competitors

You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.

Content gap report with multiple competitors

You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:

Selecting all 3 competitors to see keywords all 3 competitors rank for

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
Enter your competitor’s domain
Go to the Paid keywords report

This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.

Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.

You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.

1. Create pages to target these keywords

You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.

However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.

Here’s how to do that:

Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report

Paste them into Keywords Explorer
Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab

For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.

Keywords under the cluster of "digital marketing"

2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics

You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.

How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:

Export your competitor’s keywords

Paste them into Keywords Explorer
Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
Look for Parent Topics you already have content about

For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”

Our competitor ranks for seven keywords that fall under the "press release template" cluster

If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.

Site search finds that we already have a blog post on press release templates

If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”

Keywords under the cluster of "press release template"

To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”

3. Target these keywords with Google Ads

Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.

For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”

If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.

If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.

You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.

Learn more

Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:

SEO

Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important

Published

1 day ago

April 23, 2024

Max

Google confirms that links are not that important anymore

Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.

Background Of Links For Ranking

Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.

One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.

The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.

Kleinberg wrote:

“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”

This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.

Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.

What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.

What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?

At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.

Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:

” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″

Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:

“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”

Why Links Matter Less

The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.

But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.

The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.

Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less

In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.

Google March 2024 Core Update: 4 Changes To Link Signal

The documentation previously said:

“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.

Links are not just listed as just another factor:

“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.

Mueller explained:

“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”

Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.

I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
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Why Google Doesn’t Need Links

The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.

Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.

Read the research papers

Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre